I've been reading that midi has pretty high polyphony - 32-128, but I think the number of wavs you can play simultaneously is low in comparison.

I was wondering if anyone has ever thought of making a midi soundbank from the individual game sounds and using java midi so they could get a better polyphony? I think since jdk 7 having access to some open source soundbank formats, creating those might be easier?

I might have skipped a page in the "What is midi?" section.. I remember my old casio having different sounds attached to different keys for drums though I think some people put instruments on different channels just to make swapping instruments out easier.

I did that once and it worked pretty well.I used the Gervill midi synthesizer source for manipulating the soundfonts but I would probably do it manually with Viena (yes with one 'n') if I ever do it again.

One thing to think of though: If you plan to use midi music together with sfxs the number of channels you can use for representing different sound sources shrink. It is max 16 channels if I don't remember it wrong.

Thanks, I've bookmarked that to investigate later. I got Viena to encode some old sound effects, and I was interested that it did some pitch shifting to attach them to a range of keys.. Might be good for adding variety to sound effects, maybe?

Remember, if you don't need pitching, that you can have drumkit soundfonts with 128 different sounds on one channel. Unlike some synthesizers, Gervill is also meant to support drumkits on every MIDI channel. As certain things (FX, panning, etc.) will be channel based, you could potentially load the same drumkit instrument on each channel, and rotate through them for each sound effect.

Some more ideas of things you can do with midi/gervill with sfxs:* doppler shift with pitch bend* positioning with balance* attenuation with volume* environment effects with chorus, reverb and lp filter freq/bandwidth

If you have a channel for each sound source and manage/prioritize these depending on context, it should be a pretty straightforward coding adventure

Gervill has also an implementation of key-based tuning, which you can use (see the demos). It also has a bunch of different chorus and reverb filters that you can change with some fancy midi messages.

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